Concerning Lupin
by FuschiaBoots
Summary: In the 24 hours after Sirius falls through the veil Lupin is haunted...but by what? Musing on Lupin...with some mystery over four parts...
1. Concerning Lupin

TITLE: Concerning Lupin  
  
AUTHOR: FuschiaBoots  
  
RATING: PG  
  
SPOILERS: If you haven't read Book 5, don't read this.  
  
SUMMARY: In the 24 hours after Sirius falls through the veil Lupin is haunted...but by what?  
  
DISCLAIMER: I am character poor. I own none of them. They bedevil my psyche.  
  
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This is an exploration of Lupin, as well as a bit of a mystery. It asks questions but doesn't provide any answers...hope you like it...and I would kill for reviews. Well...bite maybe, not kill. ;)  
  
Raindrops burst against the windows. Silvery, wet bombs that threatened to shake the dark house to pieces. Even if it had collapsed, sucked into its own black hole, he wouldn't have cared. He wouldn't have moved. Just as right now he didn't move. Couldn't move. He just sat, the corner of the old bed sagging under his weight. He sat, staring blindly into the glowing green embers of the fire he had just arrived upon.  
  
His eyes were pressed tight, lids shadowed as the dying glow of the fire cast a sickly green across the already pale face. Inky lines were drawn across his brow and down the sides of his mouth. But the face remained still. Only the slight shudder of breath showed he was more than just a statue.  
  
But he felt like stone. It was as if his whole body was being concreted from the inside out. His heart was the first thing to go. People talk about your heart breaking when you lose somebody you love. For Remus Lupin, he couldn't afford that luxury. If he could have, he would have lain down long ago and let his heart break in a million places for every person he had loved and had left him. If it hadn't been the knowledge that Harry was now left without parents or godfather, perhaps he would have allowed himself to just slide to the floor and let everything go.  
  
Instead, he steeled his body, let his heart turn to stone and lifted his eyes. Grey, misty eyes. For two precious years he had had his dearest friend back. After losing all three of them. Why were they all lost? Why couldn't he be lost with them? But now, as always, he would just have to do it alone. The Marauders were finished. If James had been the heart of the Marauders, Sirius had been the soul. He owed them one last thing: to rip the body of Peter Pettigrew out of this world. That would be it then. That would be the one last thing before he could leave and let his heart shatter.  
  
Finally the statue let out a sigh and turned his head to watch the raindrops slide down the glass. Smash the glass, Remus. Cry out. Let in the wind and the rain. But he knew he could never do anything that dramatic. He wasn't the passionate one. He was the thinker. So he would get up, leave Sirius behind, and think about how to help Harry.  
  
Lupin stood up slowly, his body tired from the evening's battle. His moth bitten robes swept the dusty floor as he dragged himself to the door. He didn't want to leave the room. Sirius' room.  
  
But he did. He left, pulling the door softly shut, grey eyes locked forward. He would never go back in.  
  
From behind the tear-streaked windowpane a reflection watched the man leave. Its face was sharp, eyes dark, hair black. The reflection looked longingly at the closing door, then faded into the rainy darkness. 


	2. Steady Rain

Surrounded by people he knew well, a sort of family he supposed, as much as comrades in war could be called a family. Molly and Arthur, Mad-Eye, Tonks, all familiar, all together, all empty. And the one figure that had mattered the most to him, now completely absent. One figure whose shadowy form seemed to loom large over the group. Lupin pushed the dark figure from his mind.  
  
A grey drizzle washed across the suburban London streetscape turning the world into a dim shadow of itself. Making no move to get under shelter Lupin was dimly aware of his fellow Order members whispering hushed goodbyes as the fled back towards whatever area of their life called to them. Everybody was leaving the Black house.  
  
He watched through dull eyes as each in turn raised a hand in farewell before disapperating. No one spoke to him. Just whip cracks piercing the air. And the accompanying beat of London rain. But behind this grim rhythm, Lupin could hear it. Flapping. It pounded inside his head; that hissed staccato flapping of the veil. This is what the horses of the apocalypse would sound like, he thought. Galloping before the breaking of the world.  
  
Absentmindedly running a hand through his thinning blond hair his eyes swept across the now empty street. Through the drizzle his eyes ghosted, throwing his mind back nearly twenty years. Lupin stared, fascinated, as a group of four boys went running past him, all laughing. One light haired, two dark, all unconcerned and unaware of the grim future the Fates had woven for them. They had been laughing, he realised, because the Marauders had just played a prank on Sirius' younger brother Regulus, who was in every way the Black poster boy Sirius wasn't. The result of which had been Regulus trapped inside a cupboard with a Boggart for three days before the Black family had even noticed he was missing. Remus watched the ghostly face of his friend light up, dark eyes glowing like coals. They had stopped glowing many years ago. He had hoped that Harry and himself could ignite them again. But nothing had worked.  
  
Then the sound of flapping overtook his senses and the illusion faded. Block it out; stop thinking about it, he told himself. Another voice whispered that to block it out would be like blocking out his whole existence. There were very few times in Remus Lupin's life that he remembered favourably. Six years at Hogwarts with James, Sirius and Peter were the best of them.  
  
Lupin swallowed hard, trying to exorcise the names from his mind. His hands gripped tightly onto a nearby railing, white knuckles biting into hard iron. Grey rain swam around him and he was drowning, fading with the steady drizzle. He had weathered so many thunderstorms somehow it seemed ironic, he thought grimly, that he was finally just going to disappear under the relentlessness of steady rain. 


	3. Patchwork Darkness

He could not bear to stay at Grimmauld place. Apparating to the only other place he could think of, a tiny moorland shack where he stayed from time to time across the years, Lupin lay down, body aching in a thousand places, and slipped into an exhausted sleep.  
  
The visitor pushed open the door to the house and walked silently towards the ragged figure. It watched the breath trickle slowly out of Lupin's lungs, through his lips, which were still pressed tightly together, even in sleep. The endless rhythm; lungs and mouth fighting to hold the air, only to lose it again.  
  
The moon's wan light played across the room. The trees outside, branches tossing in the wind, sent shadows skittering into corners.  
  
The leaves caressed the sleeping Lupin. His pale eyelids forming a patchwork canvas of ever shifting shapes. Twigs and branches adding their own lines to an already lined face.  
  
And yet, thought the visitor, he's still so beautiful.  
  
Lupin dreamed. Even in the darkness of exhaustion his mind refused to be still. Lupin dreamed of a figure, all shadowy black, crouching on the edge of his vision. No matter which way he turned his head the figure would never appear, nor disappear. It was just there, like some brooding gargoyle that refused to budge from the edge of his corneas.  
  
At one point the location of his dream changed to mirror the tiny shack where he lay asleep. Patterns of leaves driven wild by the wind spun across the walls and floor like creatures running mad. The figure was there. Weaker than before but still there, hidden among the flurry of light and dark. Once, just once, Lupin saw the shadows draw close together in some kind of form, before flickering away. After that, there was only sleep.  
  
In the grey of the morning Lupin rose stiffly from the couch, long fingers automatically spreading out the creases in his robes. They too were grey. His colour of choice. Indistinct. Inoffensive. Incalculable.  
  
He filled small basin with a pitcher of freezing cold water and splashed his face. It was one of his favourite things, that morning ritual. The reaction of skin and icy water; it made the mind sharp. James and Sirius had always teased him about his unmanly attention to cleanliness, but it was easily countered with a sly reference to their need for extra cleanliness following Quidditch training (something Lily had always agreed with him on.) Please don't think of him; please don't think of any of them, Lupin warned himself, teeth grinding together painfully.  
  
Lupin pressed his hands either side of the bowl and let the water drip off his eyelashes. Very slowly a drip of water would trace its way down from his hairline then reluctantly let go, a substitute for the tears he was unable to shed.  
  
His gaze fell further into the bowl. The drops radiated out in tiny ripples that slammed into the bowls edge, then headed back into the centre once more. Lupin's eyes began to sting, a combination of too little sleep and the cold water. Just before his eyelids met, in an attempt to squeeze out the sting, an image flashed across the ripples. Eyes wide open Lupin sent the bowl flying with a violent swipe of his left hand. Back pressed against the wall he watched, horrified, as the water grew into a damp stain on the worn wooden floor.  
  
And there was the image for the third time. Etched dark at his feet. The shape of the night shadows, the shape in the ripples of the basin. A great black dog.  
  
Lupin grabbed his wand and papers and left the house, grey robes flying out behind him like a storm. 


	4. More Than a Day

thankyou to those sweet few who reviewed, it means the world xxFuschiaBoots

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'I am being haunted.'

Dumbledore did not ask whom Lupin meant. Instead he sighed and indicated that Lupin should take the seat across from him in the dimly lit study he had established in Grimmauld Place.

'Remus. You know, as I do, Hauntings are performed by specific entities. As...as Sirius has manifested as neither a ghost, poltergeist or spirit I cannot say...I don't...' he drew off, pressing a finger into the edge of his left eye as if trying to unlock a thought.

Lupin was shocked by the exhaustion evident in the other wizard's voice.

'...May I suggest, Remus, as much as you may not wish to hear it, that you are merely creating this Haunting? Perhaps as a grief mechanism.' Again the older wizard paused, face clouded with emotions not easily read. 'We have to accept Sirius as a casualty. One I take it upon myself to be answerable for...when the time comes.'

Remus sat silently, as he often did, and followed the progress of those blue eyes as they searched his face. The eyes he always remembered as being bright were now rheumy. Faded. A dishwasher blue. The river after rain. They were eyes Remus wasn't sure he knew.

'What is behind the curtain in the ministry?' he asked, his voice cool. Dumbledore's eyes, he noticed, drifted from his face and rested a moment on his hands.

'I knew only what I told you, and the others, on our approach to the ministry. It brings death. Believe me Remus, I don't know everything.' A faint smile crept onto his lips, but it didn't reach his eyes. 'Although on my good days I rather fancy I do!' The smile slipped away as the sun on an overcast day.

Lupin lidded his eyes and pushed up, knees cracking.

'Goodnight.'

Dumbledore watched the door shut and listened as Lupin's light, even footsteps flowed up the stairs and across the landing. They stopped outside a room on the third floor, near the end of the corridor. Sirius' room. But there was no sound of another door opening.

Lupin reached the door to Sirius' room. What _was _Sirius' room, he corrected himself.

All that was left of the dim moon's light seeped through a small high window and down the corridor, managing only to pick out tiny details. The corner of a photo frame. An uneven floorboard. A glint on the bronze door handle. Remus felt boneless as he slid down the wall until he was pooled, knees to chest, robes flowing around him, just staring at the door.

If Dumbledore had walked into the corridor then he would have seen only those tiny details picked out in the moon's icy light.

A photo frame.

A floorboard.

Sirius' door handle.

And the edge of a fine patrician nose with a glint of a tear upon it.

More than a day had passed.


End file.
